OrnaVerum - James Connection OrnaVerum Family - James Connection The James Connection I'm very grateful to my wife Sonia for supplying a galley proof (please click here to see a copy) for p 941 of the 1995 edition of Debrett's Peerage & Baronetage which has helped to fill-in some vital details in this table. Also, when Googling for additional details, I've noticed that keeps popping up, and it has provided a bonanza of useful information, though in an almost totally unpredictable sort of way.

A great deal of information (most of it to be taken cum grano salis) can be found in Edward James' memoirs (dictated to tape, then edited by George Melly – whose own autobiography was memorably entitled Rum, Bum and Concertina) Swans Reflecting Elephants: My Early Years, Edward James, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1982 (It got excoriating reviews in The Times and The Daily Telegraph, but it's still a fascinating social document, well worth browsing.) The Edward James Foundation, ed Peter Sarginson, The Edward James Foundation, 1992 Please note in this table that familiar names are used rather than given forenames, where appropriate. These may be diminutives, alternative names (ekenames or nicknames) or simply subsidiary forenames, and I've tried to indicate these various possibilities in italicised parentheses. For example William Dodge James is listed as William James. His eldest daughter Helen Millicent is listed as Millicent(2) James, and his third daughter Alexandra Maud Venetia is listed as Xandra. Offspring are listed in chronological order of birth irrespective of sex.

# (10 Apr 1782 – 17 Feb 1849) (m 22 Oct 1799) (17 Apr 1801 – 27 Nov 1876) Mason James (2 Dec 1812 – 3 Jun 1813) Henry James (21 Jul 1821 – 27 Jul 1897) Caroline James (20 May 1816 – 13 Jan 1866) Harriet James (29 Jul 1818 – 11 Jun 1880) Jane Trowbridge James (18 Apr 1823 – 9 Aug 1852) Martha James (13 Oct 1826 – 29 Mar 1846) ‑4 (17 Apr 1801 – 27 Nov 1876) Elizabeth Woodbridge Phelps (2 Aug 1807 – 21 Jun 1847) (m 24 Mar 1829) (15 Apr 1832 – 1

3 Sep 1907) Elizabeth Eggleston James (21 Nov 1818 – 10 Feb 1870) (m 19 Feb 1849) Frank Linsly James 1 , 2 (21 Apr 1851 – 21 Apr 1890) John Arthur James 1 , 2 (24 Feb 1853 – 30 Apr 1917) William (Willie) Dodge James (7 Dec 1854 – 22 Mar 1912) Ruth Lancaster Dickinson (1 Jun 1867 – 4 Jun 1941) ‑3 Mary Venetia Cavendish-Bentinck 1 , 2 (4 Jun 1861 – 2 May 1948) (m 7 Dec 1885) Evelyn Forbes ('Mrs Willie James') (1868 – 13 May 1929) daughter of Sir Charles John Forbes 4th Baronet Lt Col John Chaytor Brinton 1 , 2 CVO DSO (5 Apr 186

7 – 6 Apr 1951) (m 30 Aug 1913) Maj.

Henry Ralph Mowbray Howard 1 , 2 (Howard-Sneyd) (m 8 Jun 1911) Lt Col Arthur Edward Flynn Fawcus DSO MC (1886 – 10 Aug 1936) Sir John Menzies Wilson 3rd Baronet (12 Feb 1885 – 22 Oct 1968) (m 5 Jan 1921) (15 Sep 1897 – 7 Aug 1927) (m 25 Mar 1922) son of Sir Stuart Auchinloss Coats 2nd Baronet (28 Sep 1893 – 8 Nov 1956) (m 18 Aug 1930) 1 : Please click here for some most interesting and authoritative information sent by Ted Robbens (and gratefully utilised in this table) about the resolute and entrepreneurial patriarch Daniel James. It also corrects certain widespread misconceptions as to the sources of the James family wealth.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_James_(businessman) Please skip the following notes if you are totally uninterested in prurient scandal-mongering. No, I thought not... Edward James firmly believed that his maternal grandmother Helen Forbes (née Moncrieffe, the wife of Sir Charles Forbes) had stooped to folly with the future Edward VII and that his mother Evelyn Forbes (Mrs Willie James) was the daughter of Edward VII rather than of Sir Charles. Other contemporary social observers thought that the stooping to folly was on the part of Mrs Willie James herself some decades later, and that Edward James' father was Edward VII rather than William James himself. Indeed Hilaire Belloc went so far as to put some verse into the public domain about what the rich and privileged got up to after hours during house-parties at places such as West Dean. Such corridor creeping was a stock feature of smart set house parties. There will be bridge and booze 'till after three And, after that, a lot of them will grope Along the corridors in robes de nuit Pyjamas, or some other kind of dope.

A sturdy matron will be sent to cope With Lord —, who isn't quite the thing, And give his wife the leisure to elope ... And Mrs James will entertain the King. For a fascinating and authorative account of the lifestyles of the rich and titled (the Marlborough House set) in those days, see the link (or click here for a local copy) Edward James also firmly believed that his mother Mrs Willie had stooped to folly with Sir Edward Grey (the English Foreign secretary who would later remark that the lamps were going out all over Europe), and that his sister Audrey was the result. He based his belief on the shape of her nose! The Rude Forefather(s) Obviously there is a limit to how far backwards or sideways one can extend a family tree, and the zone of our personal interest is anyway probably demarcated by great grandparents and second cousins – sometimes rather less! But even at greater removes there can be isolated individuals who command our interest and/or admiration. And the remove may also lie in an almost unimaginable difference in wealth and privilege.

I came from an impecunious background in which one would spend half an hour searching for a lost sixpence, whereas Edward James inherited a million pounds (50 million in today's terms) on reaching 21 and his father William James had left 20 million pounds (almost 2 billion in today's terms) back in 1912. William James was a thoroughly good and decent man, revered by all who knew him. Even Edward doesn't have a bad word to say about him in the memoirs referenced above. He and his brothers were repatriates from America, where their grandfather and father (Daniel) had made a simply mind-boggling amount of money, firstly in copper-mining and thereafter in timber, railroads etc etc etc. Click here for an account of his family background and marriage in 1889. The propinquity of his father-in-law's estate to Balmoral does provide circumstantial support to later allegations by his son Edward! In 1891 William purchased West Dean House in Sussex and had it substantially remodelled a year or two later, and the irresistible combination of his family wealth and his wife's beauty soon made it a focal point of the social season.

Click here for a survey of the West Dean interior in those early days. Many years later, in 1964, Edward endowed it to the Edward James Foundation, a charitable trust, and it became a college in 1971, since when it has become renowned for the quality and variety of its residential courses in the creative arts. There is little to suggest that William took much part in the social whirl, and much preferred to make better use of his time. As Edward recalled, loc cit: My father was a remarkable man. His philanthropy wasn't just for the look of the thing, he did it because he wanted to help the human race. He gave himself to all the people on his estate. They were deeply devoted to him and he is still remembered throughout Sussex as being a most wonderful landlord and a father to the people of the estate. He was a very busy man. He was still the chairman of many companies, and he was building the hospital wing in Chichester and was involved in the Edward VII Sanatorium ... and he always found time to read to me for an hour in the morning and an hour before I went to bed.

Touching tributes are still on record for William's generosity in providing a social clubhouse in 1885 for the people of Woolton, a village near Liverpool, where his father had settled on coming to England in about 1830, and where William had been born in 1854. A copy of his farewell note to the people of Woolton makes a fitting adieu to William himself. He died prematurely, of cancer. Memorial to Millicent James and her sisters A service of dedication of this plaque to Willie and Evelyn James' daughters was held some years ago at St Andrew's Church, West Dean , attended (inter alia) by my wife Sonia and numerous cousins. © ornaverum.org All rights reserved George Melly | Music | The Guardian George Melly George Melly: singer, writer, fisherman, 'tart'. Julian Mitchell Share on Messenger Close George Melly, who has died aged 80, was one of the most genial and genuinely popular figures in the world of British entertainment.

Dressed like a 30s gangster or a 40s Harlem hipster, a huge hat on his large head, his ample figure and rubbery face, with its mischievous hint of Mr Toad, were warmly welcomed wherever he went. He was a "personality" who actually had personality, a jazz singer who was also a cultural commentator, a devotee of the Surrealists who wrote the story-lines of a cartoon-strip. Presenter-performer, autobiographer, libertarian and in his own word "tart", he was "Good-Time George". Alan George Heywood Melly was born in Liverpool. His father, an easy-going man, came from a large and well-known Liverpool business family, and made a comfortable living in the wool trade, which he hated. Tom didn't mind what anyone did, so long as it made them happy. Maud, George's Jewish mother, had once dreamed of a career on the stage, and remained a leading figure in Liverpool's amateur dramatics.

(George's sister Andree was to become a well-known actress.) Maud was the friend of many theatrical queens, and visiting stars such as Robert Helpman, Frederick Ashton and Douglas Byng were often at the house near Aigburth Road, as was David Webster, then running a department store in Liverpool before taking over the Royal Opera House. George wrote his autobiography backwards, starting with his early years in the jazz world, and working back to his childhood. Scouse Mouse (1984) is an affectionate account of 1930s middle-class Liverpool and its numerous Melly eccentrics. The snake in the Eden of Sefton Park was George's headmaster at Parkfield prep school, the alcoholic WW Twyne. A manic wielder of the house slipper, given to purple rages, Twyne deplored almost everything about the modern world except games. His denunciations of ballet and leftwing politics were so extreme that George knew at once that he would like both. Thus his interest in both anarchism and surrealism, developed at Stowe, can be traced to his comfortable Liverpudlian beginnings, just as his passion for fishing went back to family holidays in North Wales.

George clearly lacked officer-like qualities and was unable to qualify even as a naval clerk when he was called up in 1944. He remained a skiving Ordinary Seaman for most of his three and a half years service, leaving anarchist tracts on the messdeck to annoy his superior officers. He spent most of his leaves in London getting to know the Surrealist circle that gathered round the Belgian poet and gallery-owner ELT Mesens, and relishing an exuberant homosexual life made much easier by his uniform. Rum, Bum and Concertina (1977), his account of this period, is extremely funny. As a convinced surrealist George felt an obligation to be shocking and subversive, but his sense of reality and his sense of humour kept him out of serious trouble. After the Navy he went to work for Mesens in his West End gallery, but was dismayed to find him a painfully bourgeois businessman, as he wrote in Don't Tell Sybil (1997), his memoir of their relationship. Until then George had known jazz only from records, but he now started going to live performances of what was then called "revivalist" jazz.

These were the years of early Humphrey Lyttelton, Graeme Bell and Cy Laurie. Quite soon George was singing with Mick Mulligan's band. Owning Up (1965) is George's first-hand account of the professional jazz world of the 1950s, when the drinking was hard, the travel incessant and the sex easy. Under Mulligan's influence, George developed a voluminous appetite for girls, and eventually got married in 1955 to Victoria Vaughan. Never wishing to be an original singer - the whole aim of his performance was to imitate as far as possible the great heroes and particularly heroines of the Blues - George could not avoid bringing his own character to the music. White, middle-class and English, he was as unlike Bessie Smith as it was possible to be, but his homage to the black musicians was as successful as it was unlikely. He also began to develop an independent reputation as a writer and critic.

When Wally Fawkes, Humphrey Lyttelton's clarinetist, decided to give up jazz for cartooning under the name of Trog, the infuriated Lyttelton refused to go on writing the story-lines for the Flook strip in the Daily Mail. Fawkes turned to George. Flook, an apparently cuddly creature from prehistoric times, was really a freethinking social critic who could be extremely sharp and subversive, and the strip proved a perfect medium for a surreal imagination. Later George was to provide the same sort of service for Mark Boxer when he was drawing cartoons for The Times and other newspapers, including The Guardian. With the arrival of the Beatles, the trad jazz scene went quiet and Mulligan felt the call to open an off-licence. George took the change in his stride, becoming the Observer's first pop critic. Revolt Into Style (1970) was the first serious attempt to analyse pop culture by someone who was part of it. He went on to review television, then movies.

He also wrote the scripts for two films - Smashing Time (1967), and Take a Girl like You (1970), adapted from the novel by Kingsley Amis. His divorce in 1962 was followed the next year by marriage to Diana Dawson, and he was a leading figure in the "permissive society", someone whose name was constantly attached to letters to the press, and who could be guaranteed to take the libertarian view on sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. He was still singing, when asked, and sometimes when not. In 1974, ever the "tart" in search of applause, he went back on the road with John Chilton and the Feetwarmers, and he continued to tour the country with them for almost 30 years, growing increasingly deaf from standing in front of trumpets and trombones, but still pulling in the crowds. A series of articles he wrote for Punch about the pains and pleasures of the itinerant musical life were collected in Mellymobile (1982). He was successful outside Britain, too, performing at Michael's pub in New York, and touring Australia.

In London, the Christmas stints at Ronnie Scott's became a major feast in the calendar of British jazz, and he often appeared at the Brecon Jazz Festival near his home in Wales. When John Chilton decided to retire in 2002, George began a new lease of jazz life with Digby Fairweather. Though he now wore a piratical black eye-patch after an operation, and sometimes had to sit down to sing - in 2005 he was diagnosed with lung cancer, then vascular dementia - and though his style never markedly changed, new people were always discovering him, particularly students, his popularity remained firm through all the shifting fashions of the music world and his CDs continued to sell. In 2005 he published Slowing Down, an account of what to other people might be thought the indignities of growing old. Never one to hide his own deficiencies, he and Diana later made a film about vascular dementia and the problems caused to both sufferers and carers.

His writings about art included an edition of Edward James's Swans Reflecting Elephants (1982), a book about Scottie Wilson (It's All Writ Out For You, 1985) and a touching account of his personal attachment to surrealism in Paris and the Surrealists, (with photos by Michael Woods, 1991). He was delighted to open the V&A's surrealist exhibition in the spring of 2007, and made a film about the subject with Alan Yentob. Always an avid collector of paintings, he liked the primitive and the naif. There were African paintings on his walls and many by completely unknown artists as well as by Edward Burra and Jim Dine. He paid for his beautiful stretch of fishing on the Usk by selling a Picasso drawing, a Klee water-colour and a Magritte oil. Here for many years he spent his holidays with his family in a converted medieval tower in the middle of the valley. When George wasn't there his beautiful wife Diana, as independent-minded as George himself and a friend to many writers, ran it as a b&b. It was under her roof that Bruce Chatwin wrote Under the Black Hill.

Diana, their son Tom, Diana's daughter Candy, and Candy's daughter Kezzie, were his affectionate but critical holiday audience, and one or the other often accompanied George abroad when he was writing travel articles. He also had a daughter, Pandora, from his first marriage. When the Usk became too much, he and Diana sold the Tower and bought a cottage near Newbury so he could fish in the Kennett. He wrote about his life as a fisherman in Hooked (2000). By this time the once rebellious George had been taken so much to the heart of the establishment that he had been awarded no less than four honorary degrees. Like many people attracted to anarchism, George was neurotically fastidious in his habits, and there was much that was contradictory in his personality. A compulsive story-teller, he even talked loudly on the riverbank as he cast for trout, a well-known way of frightening the fish. But he recognised the contradictions, indeed revelled in them, and made them his subject. First and foremost a performer, he loved both to entertain and shock his audience, and though shocking naturally became more difficult as he grew older, he was never shocked himself.

His favourite quote in old age was Groucho Marx's "Hello, I must be going". And now he has gone. Open-minded, open-hearted, he will be missed all over Britain by people of every class and kind. Alan George Heywood Melly, jazz singer, writer and broadcaster, born August 17 1926; died July 5, 2007 Jazz singer George Melly dies - Telegraph Jazz singer George Melly dies George Melly was famed for his garish suits By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent 12:01AM BST 05 Jul 2007 Obituary: George Melly | Video: A colourful character Tributes have poured poured in for George Melly, the jazz singer, larger-than-life fixture on London’s bohemian circuit, author and flamboyant raconteur following his death at the age of 80. Melly, the sometime bisexual, heavy drinking former public schoolboy famous for wearing flamboyant suits, loud ties and fedora hats, had been suffering from lung cancer for two years but he refused any treatment. Though he also developed dementia, he continued singing and made his last stage appearance only last month.

Related Articles The entertainer Roy Hudd, a longstanding friend, called Melly "the perfect Victorian man - he could do everything". "He brought us a lot of fun and a lot of pleasure. It was rather a tight-arsed thing, this revival of trad jazz, but George brought huge fun to it." Digby Fairweather, the jazz trumpeter who frequently performed with him, said: "He was unique, an irreplaceable culture icon, a dedicated founder of the British Jazz Revival, who carried his conviction all the way through his life, becoming a master spokesman for both the jazz and the blues as well as being the most gifted polymath to work in the jazz scene." Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, the former editor of The Sunday Telegraph, whose name became inextricably linked with Melly’s in the 1970s, said: "There was nobody like him. It was his character. He was a wild 1960s figure but somehow the nation took him to its heart." In 1977, Sir Peregrine disclosed in a collection of essays that he had been seduced by Melly on the couch in the art room at Stowe school when they were pupils there.

Melly, who always maintained that he was mainly gay in his adolescence, bisexual in the Navy and heterosexual in later life, denied it - or at least said that he had no memory of the episode. For revenge, Melly reviewed Sir Peregrine’s autobiography in 1993 and called him a snob and "a bit of a s***". Sir Peregrine, 83, was adamant today that their adolescent indiscretion had happened. He said: "It was very harmless. I’ve never claimed it was more than a harmless fumble. I suppose our names will forever connected for this rather squalid episode and if there is ever an obituary of me, there it’ll be again." He said that he and Melly had met often since he made his claim and "we would roar with laughter" about it. Sir Peregrine said: "There was never any ill-will. He was so warm-hearted and had such great charm and jollity." Though raffishness was Melly’s public face, there was much more to him.

He was the author of three well-crafted volumes of autobiography - one, Rum, Bum and Concertina was a hilarious account of his days in the Navy as the war ended and his early experiments with sex and jazz. He also wrote accomplished books on surrealism - he was a serious collector of surrealist art - and wrote Wally Fawkes’s strip cartoon, Flook, in The Daily Mail for 15 years and he was first pop critic and then film critic of The Observer from 1965 to 1971. In 1974, he resumed his career as jazz’s "Good Time George" and went back on the road with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers. His annual Christmas residency at Ronnie Scott’s became a sell-out tradition. Melly was also a passionate fly-fisherman and in 1985 he raised £47,000 to buy a home and a mile-long stretch of the River Usk by selling three important paintings, a Magritte, a Klee and an Ernst. He said recently: "I don’t fear death. I’m a fatalist, although I would rather death came as a shock to me.

"I’ve always said I wanted to die either coming off stage with the applause in my ears or of a terminal stroke on a river bank with two trout by my side." A trilby, a cigar and taste for good life - Liverpool Echo A trilby, a cigar and taste for good life Joe Riley pays tribute to George Melly Share Get daily updates directly to your inbox + Subscribe Could not subscribe, try again laterInvalid Email Joe Riley pays tribute to George Melly MUSICIAN, writer and wit George Melly, who died today aged 80, was the last of the Technicolor generation of artistic Scousers who shone through the post-war years. He belonged to the same premier larger-than-life league as the poet Adrian Henri, sculptor Arthur Dooley and Cavern DJ Bob Wooler. George was indeed colourful, usually found wearing a trilby and a stripy suit more reminiscent of a pair of pyjamas. Not for nothing was he known as “good life George”. He liked most of the vices, including smoking – a cigar, of course – and drinking.

The last time we stormed a bar together, in Seel Street on one of his many visits back home as a jazz singer, he was decked out in a tracksuit sponsored by J and B whisky. Although he famously performed at an Empire Theatre benefit for the miners, George never really lost his upper middle class bearing, as the son of a wool broker, growing up against the backdrop of Sefton Park, where he developed a life-long dedication to the now restored palm house. Although he was world-travelled and globally admired for his writing, George never stopped thinking of Liverpool as home (and that was despite buying a castle and two miles of fresh water river in Wales where he indulged his hobby of fly-fishing). “I assure you,” he told me, “that I get more of a buzz walking down Parkfield Road than I do standing in the great square in Venice.” George was less happy being labelled as Liverpool’s answer to Oscar Wilde. The literary parallel delighted him, but he was less easy with the gay connotations. For George, once openly bisexual, turned totally straight in later life, marrying twice. Even so, he lived the outrageous life of a poseur.

Who else would publish a volume of autobiography entitled Rum, Bum and Concertina? When invited to a dinner of the Young Communist League he turned up wearing tails. He later appeared as a defence witness in the Oz publishing obscenity trial. George, brother of the actress Andree Melly, was never happier than when crooning his way through a set of jazz songs. He toured extensively, most often with John Chiltern’s Feetwarmers. George worked hard and played hard. He paid the price with declining health, propped up on a walking stick. He was diagnosed with lung cancer and dementia, but refused treatment. But the Melly magic marches on. His life was like an entire city in illumination.

Like us on Facebook George Melly - Telegraph George Melly George Melly, the legendary jazz musician, author and raconteur, has died aged 80 12:03AM BST 06 Jul 2007 Ol' rockin' chair | The joint is jumpin' | Frankie and Johnny George Melly, the jazz singer, author and raconteur who died yesterday aged 80, leched, drank and blasphemed his way around the clubs and pubs of the British Isles and provided pleasure to the public for five decades. Melly’s involvement in jazz was born out of a romantic nostalgia for a golden age of brothel music. Appearing in the 1950s with Mick Mulligan’s Magnolia band and later for nearly three decades with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers, "Good Time George" followed a well-established routine of singing numbers from the 1920s (his foremost influences being Bessie Smith, Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton) interspersed with camp asides and bawdy anecdotes.

Related Articles Martial Solal - the veteran jazzman still going strong 15 Nov 2010 Loopy-mouthed and rotund under an outsized fedora, Melly could always be relied upon to wear louder suits and tell better, funnier and dirtier jokes than anyone else on the circuit. With a smile once described as "a cross between a leer and a twinkle", he pushed hard at the boundaries of public taste, knowing that, like the errant schoolboy he once was, he would always be forgiven. "I have this ability to appear outrageous without paying the consequences for it," he observed. Melly went through periods of colossal excess. When he and John Chilton began their annual Christmas season at Ronnie Scott’s in 1973 (the first of a series of Christmas bookings that ran for more than a quarter of a century) Melly’s performances had a uniquely erratic quality: "The captain is no longer in command of the ship," was one of John Chilton’s more diplomatic announcements as Melly, one night, slumped down the microphone stand on to the deck. Along with his drinking, his sexuality (about which he was remarkably candid) became inseparable from his public image.

Beginning with mutually satisfactory fondlings beneath the desks at prep school, he proceeded at Stowe, and in the lower decks of the Royal Navy, to a life of enthusiastic homosexuality; though when the former editor of The Sunday Telegraph, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, claimed to have been seduced by Melly on the Stowe art room sofa, Melly denied the charge: "I seduced many young men," he conceded, "but he was years older, so I wouldn’t have dared." Despite these Bohemian urges, Melly had been born with a strong instinct for self-preservation: "I didn’t carry my romanticism to the point of an early grave," he once acknowledged. "My own middle-class background came and reclaimed me before it was too late." After being seduced by Sybil Mesens, the wife of the surrealist ELT Mesens, he became "absolutely devoted to heterosexuality", a conversion confirmed by 44 years of more or less happy marriage to his second wife Diana.

His heroic consumption of alcohol took longer to renounce, but from the early 1980s, when he changed a bottle of brandy a night for a bottle of wine, Melly could generally be relied upon to stay upright for the duration of a performance, although his act remained as unpredictable as ever. On one occasion at Ronnie Scott’s Melly had decided to perform in full drag, and sent John Chilton on to the stage to tell the audience that he was indisposed — but that, luckily, his aunt Georgina, who knew all of his songs, would valiantly fill the gap. "Georgina" duly swept on stage, and the disguise was so complete that the audience was wholly deceived. The effect was disastrous. Whereas George Melly suggestively warbling I Want A Hot Dog In My Roll had always been received with bellows of laughter, when "Aunt Georgina" sang the same words, Chilton recalled, "it presented a pathetic picture of an old trout begging to be serviced". Afterwards, two appalled members of the audience came up to Chilton and said they sincerely hoped George would soon recover. There was, though, a serious side to the funster and jazz singer.

Surrealism, along with jazz, was the great passion of Melly’s life and he lectured and wrote extensively on the subject. But lewdness was never divorced from scholarship, and serious research was always spiced with saucy anecdotes about encounters with prostitutes and seedy metropolitan low-life. The more prosaic could find Melly’s "surrealist" side disconcerting. He admitted to belonging to an "unofficial club of surreally-minded people" who took "certain mutual premises" for granted; and his conversation would often be spiced with baffling non-sequiturs which left others feeling the conversation was getting out of control. "Yes, you’re right. Maud was a star in the amateur theatre," he would reply to a question about something entirely different. Some, though, attributed this characteristic to the fact that in his later life he was almost stone deaf. Alan George Heywood Melly was born in Liverpool on August 17 1926. The Melly family were wealthy pillars of Liverpool society and young George and his brother and sister led a comfortable life in a large, ugly, Victorian terraced house in the Sefton Park area. His parents were unusual for their time.

His mother, Maud, a talented amateur actress, Jewish and flamboyant, had a close circle of homosexual friends whom Melly’s father Tom, an open-minded and undemanding man, was happy to have in the house: "I learned to equate wit and creativity with homosexuality even before I knew what it was," George Melly later recalled. He still did not know what it was at Parkfield prep school when, aged nine, he was introduced by an older boy to the pleasures of "rubbing up", a practice which grew into something of an epidemic at the school and which was temporarily halted only when some of the older boys were discovered in flagrante in the changing rooms by the headmaster, an eccentric martinet called WW Twynne. The young Melly was subsequently astonished to learn that this pleasurable activity was in some way associated with procreation. He would later recall these early years in Scouse Mouse, his third volume of autobiography, published in 1984. At Stowe Melly broadened his interests and discovered the pleasures of jazz after hearing a recording of Bessie Smith singing Gimme a Pig-foot and a Bottle of Beer.

He also became passionate about the Surrealists after reading Herbert Read’s book on the subject. His sex life, too, developed beyond youthful fondlings, so that: "I left Stowe a convinced homosexual, believing and accepting I would always remain one. I felt no shame. On the contrary I considered myself part of an elite, a freemasonry whose members held most of the keys to what was truly creative and exciting in the grown-up world." From school, at the tail end of the war, he joined the Royal Navy because he liked the uniform, though unlike many of his fellow old boys he failed to be promoted to the upper deck. In 1977 he chronicled his three and a half years as an able seaman in the appropriately titled Rum, Bum and Concertina, a bawdy account concerned chiefly with his serial seductions of young men and his run-ins with authority in the shape of a warrant officer called Perkins. At around this time he began to sing to amuse his colleagues, and in 1947 he was dropped from a Royal Naval Command Variety Performance after Warrant Officer Perkins discovered a pile of anarchist leaflets in his locker.

Since the number he had been intending to perform before the King was his own highly suggestive rendition of Frankie and Johnnie (a song that became a standard in his repertoire) it was probably as well. On his leaves in London, Melly met ELT Mesens, the Belgian surrealist and art dealer who had come to Britain in 1936 to run the London Gallery in Brook Street and was generally acknowledged to be the leader of the surrealist movement in Britain. After leaving the Navy Melly became his assistant at the gallery, and it was through Mesens that he began his journey to heterosexuality. Melly’s discovery of women came about in 1948 at the age of 22 when Sybil Mesens invited him to bed in front of her husband. Melly managed to oblige, watched and then followed by Mesens himself: "It was the first time I had been to bed with a woman," Melly recalled, "albeit bridged by her husband. Suddenly I discovered I wasn’t gay." Melly later wrote a biography of Mesens entitled Don’t Tell Sybil (1997).

While working for Mesens Melly became involved in the traditional jazz scene and began to spend his evenings in clubs on the outskirts of London "where my violent enthusiasm, frequent drunkenness and personal manner of dancing attracted a lot of not entirely kindly amusement". He soon met Mick Mulligan, a jazz trumpeter looking to start his own band, and in 1950 he left Mesens to go on the road with Mulligan’s band. Their public performances began unpromisingly at Perivale youth club, where, in default of a microphone, Melly was reduced to amplifying his voice by shouting into an old biscuit tin. "The lads listened politely," he recalled. "After about half an hour a small boy poked his head round the door of the recreation room and shouted 'Chocolate biscuits in the canteen’. Rationing was still in force and the whole room emptied for the rest of the evening." As revivalist jazz gained ground the band’s fortunes improved, and they toured jazz clubs, dance halls and pubs around the country, playing and drinking into the small hours before retiring, usually dead drunk, to seedy lodgings in regional back streets.

Melly remained the band’s featured singer, through many changes of personnel, for 12 years. On the road he gradually widened his experience of women, often by taking Mulligan’s pick-ups off him when he was too drunk to care. In 1955 he became engaged to Victoria Vaughan, but as his wife’s family were Catholic converts and she was under 21, they were forced to elope and were married in Scotland. Within a year, though, the marriage was in a bad way and they parted company. In 1956 Melly became the caption writer to Flook, the strip cartoon in The Daily Mail drawn by Willy Fawkes (alias Trog). The job doubled his income, though much of the extra money went on heroic drinking sessions in El Vino. In 1961 he did a piece for Queen magazine in which he described his life as a jazz singer: "On the Road. Ten years of it. I seem to have spent a lifetime looking out of grimy windows in digs at backyards in the rain. Weeds; rotting iron, collapsing outhouses." Out of that article came other reviews and pieces.

By 1962 he and Mulligan decided they had had enough of touring and, after a final concert at which one of the band fell off the stage and pulled a Christmas tree down on top of him, they disbanded, and Melly turned full time to writing and journalism. From 1965 to 1972 he worked as a pop music, television and film critic on The Observer and won the Critic of the Year award at the 1970 IPC National Press Awards. He also produced film scripts for Smashing Time (1968) and Take a Girl Like You (1970), and was a regular guest on The Critics. In 1965 he wrote Owning Up, the first part of his autobiography, about his years with the Mick Mulligan band. Melly continued to get into just about enough trouble to keep life interesting. During the mid-1960s he was arrested in London at a Ban the Bomb demonstration and ended up sharing a cell with Vanessa Redgrave. In 1962, on a visit to the Colony Room, he met Diana Dawson, a woman many years his junior, and they spent the afternoon together.

At the time both were married to other people and Melly was attempting a reconciliation with Victoria. Three days later he went to Victoria’s bedroom to tell her he had fallen in love with someone else, but: "before I’d got it out she told me she was leaving. She’d fallen in love with someone else." Divorces ensued, and he and Diana married in 1963 shortly before the birth of their son. In 1971 he gave evidence for the defence in the celebrated Oz trial (the magazine’s editors had been prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act for a "Schoolkids’ issue" which included pornographic images). He would have been happy, Melly proclaimed, for his 16-year-old son to edit the issue (his son was in fact eight at the time), adding for good measure that a Rupert Bear cartoon featuring the character having sex with an old woman was "the funniest thing in the magazine". By 1972, though, Melly had become bored with "respectability" and returned to performing jazz, now with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers.

After recording two LPs for Warner Brothers, Nuts (1972) and Son of Nuts (1974), Melly gave up his job as a critic for life as a full-time professional jazz singer. For a time he had his own show, Good Time George, on BBC2. As he became better known Melly’s act became more and more outrageous and his suits (inspired by the music hall and gangster movies of the 1930s and 1940s) became ever more garish. One, a red and custard coloured tartan was known as Mad Scotch Corner. A bright green number was called Murphy’s Mistake. His drinking, though, began to take a toll on his performance as a singer. After a friend asked him "Do you want to get back to singing really well or do you want to end up each evening unconscious?" he cut down on his consumption, and he and the Feetwarmers continued to perform together until 1998.

In addition to his three volumes of autobiography, Melly’s books included Revolt Into Style (1970) in which he explored the role of pop music as a bridge between rebellious adolescence and maturity; The Media Mob (1980, with Barry Fantoni); Tribe of One: Great Naive and Primitive Painters of the British Isles (1981); a biography of Scottie Wilson entitled It’s All Writ Out For You (1986); and a scholarly study (with Michael Woods) of Paris and the Surrealists (1991). From 1970, when he and his wife bought a holiday home in the Brecon Beacons, Melly became a keen fly-fisherman. He remained philosophical about growing old: "The body, like a car, spends more and more time in the garage," he wrote. "Something, though not necessarily serious, is always going wrong. Soon it won’t be worth paying for the repairs." His evenings, the former hell-raiser confessed, were generally spent "drinking chocolate and dunking digestive biscuits while wondering if I can be bothered to watch an 'adult’ movie".

George Melly is survived by his wife Diana, by their son, and by a daughter from his first marriage. Obituary: George Melly | Music | The Guardian Music George Melly Jazz singer, art lover, writer and fisherman, he held firm to his open-hearted, tolerant values into old age Julian Mitchell Share on Messenger Close George Melly, who has died aged 80, was one of the most genial and genuinely popular figures in the world of British entertainment. Dressed like a 1930s gangster or a 1940s Harlem hipster, with a huge hat on his large head, his ample figure and rubbery face, with its mischievous hint of Mr Toad, were warmly welcomed wherever he went. He was a "personality" who actually had personality, a jazz singer who was also a cultural commentator, a devotee of the surrealists who wrote the story lines of a cartoon strip. Presenter-performer, autobiographer, libertarian and in his own word "tart", he was "Good-Time George". Melly was born in Liverpool.

His father, an easy-going man, came from a large and well-known local business family, and made a comfortable living in the wool trade, which he hated. Tom didn't mind what anyone did, so long as it made them happy. Maud, George's Jewish mother, had once dreamed of a stage career, and remained a leading figure in Liverpool amateur dramatics. (George's sister Andrée was to become a well-known actor.) Maud was the friend of many theatrical queens, and visiting stars such as Robert Helpmann, Frederick Ashton and Douglas Byng were often at the house near Aigburth Road, as was David Webster, then running a department store in Liverpool before taking over the Royal Opera House. George wrote his autobiography backwards, starting with his early years in the jazz world, and working back to his childhood. Scouse Mouse (1984) is an affectionate account of 1930s middle-class Liverpool and its numerous Melly eccentrics. The snake in the Eden of Sefton Park was George's headmaster at Parkfield prep school, the alcoholic WW Twyne.

A manic wielder of the house slipper, given to purple rages, Twyne deplored almost everything about the modern world except games. His denunciations of ballet and leftwing politics were so extreme that George knew, at once, that he would like both. Thus his interest in both anarchism and surrealism, developed at Stowe public school, can be traced to his comfortable Liverpudlian beginnings - just as his passion for fishing went back to family holidays in north Wales. George clearly lacked officer-like qualities, and was unable to qualify even as a naval clerk when he was called up in 1944. He remained a skiving ordinary seaman for most of his three and a half years' service, leaving anarchist tracts on the messdeck to annoy his superior officers. He spent most of his leaves in London getting to know the surrealist circle that gathered round the Belgian poet and gallery-owner ELT Mesens, and relishing an exuberant homosexual life made much easier by his uniform. Rum, Bum and Concertina (1977), his account of this period, is extremely funny.

As a convinced surrealist, George felt an obligation to be shocking and subversive, but his sense of reality and his sense of humour kept him out of serious trouble. After the navy he went to work for Mesens in his West End gallery, but was dismayed to find him a painfully bourgeois businessman, as he wrote in Don't Tell Sybil (1997), his memoir of their relationship. Until then George had known jazz only from records, but he now started going to live performances of what was then called "revivalist" jazz. These were the years of early Humphrey Lyttelton, Graeme Bell and Cy Laurie. Quite soon, George was singing with Mick Mulligan (obituary, January 4). Owning Up (1965) is George's first-hand account of the professional jazz world of the 1950s, when the drinking was hard, the travel incessant and the sex easy. Under Mulligan's influence, he developed a voluminous appetite for girls, and eventually got married in 1955, to Victoria Vaughan.

Never wishing to be an original singer - the whole aim of his performance was to imitate, as far as possible, the great heroes and, particularly, heroines of the blues - George could not avoid bringing his own character to the music. White, middle-class and English, he was as unlike Bessie Smith as it was possible to be, but his homage to the black musicians was as successful as it was unlikely. He also began to develop an independent reputation as a writer and critic. In 1956, Lyttelton resigned from writing the storylines for the Flook cartoon strip in the Daily Mail, which was created and drawn by his clarinetist Wally Fawkes, under the name of Trog. So Fawkes turned to George. Flook, an apparently cuddly creature from prehistoric times, was really a freethinking social critic who could be extremely sharp and subversive, and the strip proved a perfect medium for a surreal imagination. Later, George was to provide the same sort of service for Mark Boxer when he was drawing cartoons for the Times and other newspapers, including the Guardian.

With the arrival of the Beatles, the trad jazz scene went quiet, and Mulligan felt the call to open an off-licence. George took the change in his stride, becoming the Observer's first pop critic. Revolt Into Style (1970) was the first serious attempt to analyse pop culture by someone who was part of it. He went on to review television, then movies, from 1965 to 1973. He also wrote the scripts for two films - Smashing Time (1967), and Take a Girl Like You (1970), adapted from the Kingsley Amis novel. His divorce in 1962 was followed the next year by marriage to the beautiful Diana Dawson, and he became a leading figure in the "permissive society", someone whose name was constantly attached to letters to the press, and who could be guaranteed to take the libertarian view on sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. George was still singing when asked, and sometimes when not.

In 1974, ever the tart in search of applause, he went back on the road with John Chilton and the Feetwarmers, and continued to tour the country with them for almost 30 years, growing increasingly deaf from standing in front of trumpets and trombones, but still pulling in the crowds. A series of articles he wrote for Punch about the pains and pleasures of the itinerant musical life were collected in Mellymobile (1982). He was successful outside Britain, too, performing at Michael's pub in New York, and touring Australia. The Christmas stints at Ronnie Scott's club in London became a major feast in the calendar of British jazz, and he often appeared at the Brecon jazz festival, near his home in Wales. When Chilton decided to retire in 2002, George began a new lease of jazz life with the trumpeter Digby Fairweather. Though he now wore a piratical black eyepatch after an operation, and sometimes had to sit down to sing - in 2005 he was diagnosed with lung cancer, then vascular dementia - and though his style never markedly changed, new people, particularly students, were always discovering him.

Thus, his popularity remained firm through the shifting fashions of the music world, and his CDs continued to sell. In 2005 he published Slowing Down, an account of what to other people might be thought the indignities of growing old. Never one to hide his own deficiencies, he and Diana later made a film about vascular dementia and the problems caused to both sufferers and carers. Only last month he made an appearance, announced as his last-ever performance, at the 100 Club in London at a fundraising event to benefit the charity supporting his carers. His writings about art included an edition of Edward James's Swans Reflecting Elephants (1982), a book about Scottie Wilson (It's All Writ Out For You, 1985) and a touching account of his personal attachment to surrealism in Paris and the surrealists (with photographs by Michael Woods, 1991). He was delighted to open the Victoria and Albert Museum's surrealist exhibition last spring, and made a film about the subject with Alan Yentob. Always an avid collector of paintings, George liked the primitive and the naif.

There were African paintings on his walls and many by completely unknown artists, as well as by Edward Burra and Jim Dine. He paid for his beautiful stretch of fishing on the river Usk by selling a Picasso drawing, a Klee watercolour and a Magritte oil. Here, for many years, he spent his holidays with his family in a converted medieval tower in the middle of the valley. When George wasn't there, Diana, as independent-minded as her husband and a friend to many writers, ran it as a b&b. It was under her roof that Bruce Chatwin wrote Under the Black Hill. Diana, their son Tom, Diana's daughter Candy, and Candy's daughter Kezzie, were his affectionate but critical holiday audience, and one or the other often accompanied George abroad when he was writing travel articles. He also had a daughter, Pandora, from his first marriage. When the Usk became too much, he and Diana sold the tower and bought a cottage near Newbury, Berkshire, so he could fish in the Kennet. He wrote about his life as a fisherman in Hooked (2000).

By this time, the once rebellious George had been taken so much to the heart of the establishment that he had been awarded no fewer than four honorary degrees - although he refused an honour under New Labour. Like many people attracted to anarchism, George was neurotically fastidious in his habits, and there was much that was self-contradictory in his personality. A compulsive storyteller, he even talked loudly on the river bank as he cast for trout, a well-known way of frightening the fish. But he recognised the self-contradictions, indeed revelled in them, and made them his subject. First and foremost a performer, he loved both to entertain and shock his audience, and though shocking naturally became more difficult as he grew older, he was never shocked himself. His favourite quote in old age was Groucho Marx's, "Hello, I must be going." Open-minded, open-hearted, he will be missed all over Britain by people of every class and kind. · Alan George Heywood Melly, jazz singer, writer, critic and broadcaster, born August 17 1926; died July 5 2007

Question: Whose autobiography is entitled 'Rum, Bum and Concertina'?
Answer: GEORGE MELLEY